CURATOR

A pinboard by

PINBOARD SUMMARY

Can Tesla beat the likes of Ford and GM to take over the automotive world?

What exactly is the future of cars? The auto industry’s fate rides on the answers to three unresolved questions: driven or self-driving? Electric or gas? Private or shared?
Tesla's value A couple of weeks ago Tesla surged past automotive giants like Ford and GM to become the most valuable car company in the USA. For a firm that has existed for less than 2 decades, that is incredible. That sounds impossible It does indeed and the numbers also stand against Tesla. Tesla sold 80,000 cars last year. GM sold 10 million, meaning it exceeded Tesla’s annual vehicle sales every three days, on average. Despite the fanfare, Musk’s company lost $780 million in 2016. Ford made $11 billion. The future of Cars Right now, there is a huge focus on "self-driving cars" and this begs the question Will people drive cars, or will the cars drive themselves? The self-driving revolution is like a massive West Coast earthquake—experts claim it’s practically inevitable, but nobody can say for sure when or what it will look like. If this self-driving future never fully materializes, legacy car companies will probably benefit from the lack of disruption. But is it so obvious that they would also lose, even in the self-driving scenario? Is the future of cars electric, or something else? One of the most attractive points about Tesla is that it does not make fuel driven cars, their products are all purely electric and it is also worth mentioning that they are loaded with the best technology available. Several automakers, like General Motors and Honda, are dabbling in other clean energy, like fuel-cell systems. But hydrogen fueling stations cost about $2 million to build and there are only 34 in the United States today, with more than half in one state—California. Given the technology’s questionable viability, it is more likely that the technology will navigate more towards battery driven cars. Electric vehicles also have the benefit of tax credit benefits in almost all the countries which is a very attractive proposition for potential buyers.
It does look very promising for Tesla Indeed, with manufacturers still struggling to catch up to Tesla, it is just a matter of time that Tesla becomes a behemoth in the auto industry and perhaps even save the environment. It is a waiting game.